Some Delicious Excerpts From "How It Feels" By Jenny Zhang (one Of My All-time Faves, The Whole Thing

"The witch, the whore and the monster are all really the same archetype. Dangerous and unpredictable, they defy the archetypes of ideal womanhood that we have encountered throughout this book. They defy Venus with their ageing bodies and menstrual blood. (All things that are suppressed in our images of Venus overflow in our monsters.) They undermine maiden virginity with their unapologetic sexuality. They don't submit themselves to their husbands, nor are they exclusive with their partners. They are either happy in their own liberated independence, or they operate in covens of collective womanhood. Monstrous women know things that others don't, not just facts or magic spells but deep, primeval knowledge about bodies, time, death, and the powers of reproduction. And they age and entropy in a way that mirrors the inevitable flow and decay of all things. They are connected to wild nature in the outdoors, away from the feminised domestic spaces of the house. Most monstrous of all is that they know their power."

excerpt from Women in the Picture: What Culture Does With Female Bodies by Catherine McCormack

Ewald Mataré Landscapes, Watercolor, 1920s

Run You Might Get Away Faith Ringgold

My (?) Body by S. Bruzon

“Matilde, where are you? Down here I noticed, under my necktie and just above my heart, a certain pang of grief between the ribs, you were gone that quickly. I needed the light of your energy, I looked around, devouring hope. I watched the void without you that is like a house, nothing left but tragic windows. Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens to the fall of the ancient leafless rain, to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned; so I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.”

Sonnet LXV, I Wait For You Like A Lonely House — Pablo Neruda.

I AM 17. I HAVE A LOT TO SAY.

by Jackson Holbert

My mother was around all the time back then, always walking in and out of rooms carrying stacks of  laptop computers. She spent most of  her daylight hours blowing dust out of circuits, fans, motherboards, daughterboards. Sometimes her little canister would die and she’d have to use her mouth. My father was gone all day every day getting repetitive stress injuries at the newspaper. He was a journalist and everyone hated him, even his friends. Nothing really happened during my entire childhood so he ended up spending most days shooting paper footballs through a miniature goal post he kept in the locked drawer of  his desk. He was rarely kind. And in the few, short instances he was, it still didn’t seem like it. Something about his mouth made everything he did seem either sinister or inept. He was completely inscrutable except for a period in the spring of 2004, when he was just sad. I was young that year and my sister was older. She came home from college for the whole summer of 2005. I was 14. She told me not to worry about other people, not to worry about war, not to worry about a thing. That was the greatest summer of my short life. I had no friends. Oh I had people I talked to at school but once summer hit it was like every school bus had crashed headfirst into a wall except the one that was carrying me and my silver trumpet. I had that tall kind of  joy that you can only feel when your bones still have another few inches left in them. My sister and I would watch three movies a day and never go to the lake. Everybody says it seems like summer never ends until it does. But that’s a lie. I knew so little back then but the one thing I did know was that all my friends were coming back and I would once more join them in the hallways, in the classrooms, once more join them for hours after school in the far part of  the parking lot and would continue to do so until I turned 16 and got a job cutting my fingers on the cheese grater at the Pizza Factory. After that everything was all work work work go home Jeremy get your feet off the sofa  Jeremy work work math homework band-aids and on a good day a little trumpet and on the best days all trumpet. I wanted my life to be about music but in the end it was about getting B’s in subjects such as Spanish. I don’t know, sometimes it feels like those summers really did never end, they went on forever and just got progressively worse. We like to pretend that one day we just walk into our adulthood like a congressman walking into the ocean, but we all know that’s not true. What really happens is we walk into the same building day after day, but every night some crew comes in and replaces something little — a lamp housing, the chair of a conference table — until nothing is the same, until the building is not as we remembered it at all, until the building is stronger, up to code but a lot less fun, and the lighting, the lighting is fluorescent and obscene.

Love You, Sleep Again, Retier Softly, and Pethetic Little Thing by Tracey Emin

shoutout to whatever staff member has this bumper sticker at my school

Betta fish collage!